Focussing and Levelling in the Auckland Voices Project

Miriam Meyerhoff; Elaine Ballard; Catherine Watson; Alexandra Birchfield

doi:10.18290/rh237106.7s

Published : 2023-07-24

Vol. 71 No. 6sp (2023)

Focussing and Levelling in the Auckland Voices Project

Miriam Meyerhoff

https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2599-1870

Elaine Ballard

https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3387-7012

Catherine Watson

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9010-5188

Alexandra Birchfield

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5694-7920

DOI: https://doi.org/10.18290/rh237106.7s

Abstract

Levelling and focussing are well-documented processes, central to the emergence of new dialects, including to the emergence of New Zealand English as a distinct variety in the last hundred and fifty years. We draw on recent recordings from three areas in Auckland to examine the extent to which levelling and focussing continue to be relevant today. Most work on NZ English as a new dialect has concentrated on phonology; we extend the analysis to syntax. We consider the structure of relative clauses used in communities which have very different demographic profiles and histories of immigration. We find evidence that levelling and focussing continue to underpin the development of post-colonial English in New Zealand. Our data suggests that speakers draw on linguistically motivated solutions to the choice among variants when focussing occurs.

Keywords:

dialect levelling, focussing, generational change, language and migration, New Zealand English, relative clauses

Details

References

Statistics

Authors

Download files

pdf

Altmetric indicators

Cited by / Share

Licence

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.

References

Ball, C. N. (1996). A diachronic study of relative markers in spoken and written English. Language Variation and Change, 8(2), 227–258.

Birchfield, A. (2019). “All the people who live in Auckland”: A study of subject and non-subject relative clauses in Auckland English [Unpublished master’s thesis]. Victoria University of Wellington.

Cheshire, J. Variation in an English Dialect. Oxford University Press, 1982.

Comrie, B., & Kuteva, T. (2013). Relativization on subjects. WALS Online (v2020.3) [Data set]. In M. S. Dryer & M. Haspelmath (Eds.), The World Atlas of Language Structures Online, https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.7385533 (Available online at http://wals.info/chapter/122).

Fox, B. A., & Thompson, S. A. (1990). A discourse explanation of the grammar of relative clauses in English conversation. Language, 66(2), 297–316.

Gisborne, N. & Truswell, R. (2017). Where do relative specifiers come from? In E. Mathieu & R. Truswell (Eds.), Micro-change and macro-change in diachronic syntax (pp. 25–42). Oxford University Press.

Hinrichs, L., Szmrecsanyi, B., & Bohmann, A. (2015). Which-hunting and the Standard English relative clause. Language, 91(4), 806–836.

Huddleston, R., Pullum, G. K., & Peterson, P. Relative constructions and unbounded dependencies. In R. D. Huddleston & G. K. Pullum (Eds.), The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language (pp. 1031–1096). Cambridge University Press.

Johnson, D. E. (2009). Getting off the Goldvarb standard: Introducing Rbrul for mixed-effects variable rule analysis. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3(1), 359–383.

Le Page, R. B., & Tabouret-Keller, A. (1985). Acts of Identity: Creole-based approaches to language and ethnicity. Cambridge University Press.

Levey, S. A comparative variationist perspective on relative clauses in child and adult speech. (2014). In R. Torres Cacoulos, N. Dion, & A. Lapierre (Eds.), Linguistic variation: Confronting fact and theory (pp. 22–37). Routledge.

Meyerhoff, M., Birchfield, A., Ballard, E., Watson, C., & Charters, H. (2020). Restrictions on relatives in Auckland, New Zealand. In K. V. Beaman, I. Buchstaller, S. Fox, & J. A. Walker (Eds.), Advancing socio-grammatical variation and change: In honour of Jenny Cheshire (pp. 115–133). Routledge.

Meyerhoff, M., Ballard, E., Charters, H., Birchfield A., & Watson, C. I. (2021). The Auckland Voices Project: Language change in a changing city. In P. Peters & K. Burridge (Eds.), Exploring the ecology of world Englishes in the twenty-first century: Language, society and culture (pp. 345–368). Edinburgh University Press.

Parodi, T., & Tsimpli, I.-M. (2005). ‘Real’ and apparent optionality in second language grammars: Finiteness and pronouns in null operator structures. Second Language Research, 3, 250–285.

Romaine, S. (1984). Towards a typology of relative clause formation strategies in Germanic. In J. Fisiak (Ed.), Historical Syntax (pp. 437–470). Mouton de Gruyter.

Sakalauskaitė, J. (2016). Endogenous and Exogenous Influence on the which [Unpublished MSc in English Language thesis]. University of Edinburgh.

Sankoff, G. (2018). Language change across the lifespan. Annual Review of Linguistics, 4(1), 297–316.

Schneider, E. (2007). Postcolonial English: Varieties around the world. Cambridge University Press.

Sigley, R. J. (1997). Choosing Your Relatives: Relative Clauses in New Zealand English [Unpublished PhD thesis]. Victoria University of Wellington.

Sloetjes, H., & Wittenburg, P. (2008). Annotation by category – ELAN and ISO DCR. In Proceedings of the 6th International Conference on Language Resources and Evaluation (LREC 2008).

Tagliamonte, S. A., Smith J., & Lawrence, H. (2005). No taming the vernacular! Insights from the relatives in northern Britain. Language Variation and Change, 17(1), 74–112.

Trudgill, P. (2004). New-dialect Formation: The inevitability of colonial Englishes. Edinburgh University Press.

Trudgill, P., & Hannah, J. (2008). International English: A guide to the varieties of Standard English (5 ed.). Hodder Education.

Miriam Meyerhoff

miriam.meyerhoff@all-souls.ox.ac.uk
https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2599-1870

Affiliation:

All Souls College, Oxford United Kingdom

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Miriam Meyerhoff is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. Her sociolinguistic interests in language variation and change mainly concentrate on speech communities characterised by varying degrees of language or dialect contact, e.g. creoles in the Pacific and Caribbean, migrant communities in the UK and New Zealand. She also works on language documentation in Vanuatu.

Elaine Ballard

e.ballard@auckland.ac.nz
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3387-7012

Affiliation:

University of Auckland New Zealand

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Elaine Ballard is a Senior Lecturer in Speech Science at the School of Psychology. Her research interests focus on language variation and change in speech communities undergoing varying degrees of language or dialect contact. These include communities speaking NZ English as well as those speaking various heritage languages. She has also worked on issues of language and identity in heritage speakers.

Catherine Watson

c.watson@auckland.ac.nz
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-9010-5188

Affiliation:

University of Auckland New Zealand

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Catherine Watson is an Associate Professor at the University of Auckland, New Zealand. Her sociophonetic interests in language variation and change are mainly in New Zealand English, and te reo māori (the indigenous language of New Zealand), investigating how both monophthongs and diphthongs change over time. She also applies her findings to speech technology including providing feedback to pronunciation, and creating synthetic voices speaking New Zealand English and te reo māori.

Alexandra Birchfield

alexandrabirchfield@gmail.com
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-5694-7920

Bio Statement (e.g., department and rank)

Alex Birchfield is a Wellington based researcher and civil servant. She is interested in syntactic variation and change as well as historical sociolinguistics.